Editorial: SOCs will reshape the industry
07/01/1999
 Bob Haavind, Editor in Chief, [email protected] |
Over its first half century, the semiconductor industry has gone through constant change. Now it is moving toward perhaps the most dramatic shift of all - toward system-on-a-chip (SOC). Most electronic systems are still built from an assemblage of individual ICs - microprocessors, memories, modems, A/D and D/A converters, glue logic, and an assortment of analog chips. A typical circuit board may contain dozens of these standard parts. While many chips have been designed with a few extra functions (such as SRAM on a microprocessor), so far the SOC concept has been limited to end-products that sell in the millions, like game machines or cell phones.
Increasingly, memory, logic, processors, controllers, and perhaps even some analog functions will be put onto single chips. Programmable logic chips are approaching the mega-cell range, so that more and more complex system functions can be incorporated in this portion of a design. There has been an explosion of fabless design companies capable of achieving single-chip solutions. As electronic markets are starting to resurge, the first fabs reported at full capacity are the foundries that specialize in ASIC-type devices, often designed by fabless companies, rather than the fabs that crank out such standard IC parts as DRAMs, microprocessors, or standard logic chips.
Process capabilities at these foundries are quickly catching up to the most advanced fabs for making the highest-performance chips. The capital spending pickup now taking shape is starting first at some of these facilities, in Taiwan and Singapore, for example. Companies such as Motorola and Lucent are contracting with major foundries to expand their manufacturing capacity before they go back to building their own fabs. This extra push also has contributed to the quick build-up at the foundries. Motorola is in the process of reshaping its organization to become more agile at designing SOCs for its customers, and other large semiconductor companies are adopting design methods that will make reuse of core circuitry much more convenient, with faster design cycles. Some companies, such as Alcatel in Europe (working with Synopsys to achieve reusability of circuit design), are hoping to specialize in SOC designs that may serve a particular customer but also will find broader use in telecommunications or similar large-volume market segments. Siemens recently partnered with Synopsys to offer a software-synthesizable 16-bit embedded processor (the C166). It can act as a microcontroller core in combination with other peripherals and functional blocks all on a single chip. By making the core processor`s memory interface, interrupt control logic, and system control unit parameterized and reconfigurable, the design becomes much more flexible for individual applications.
One of the problems of combining various chunks of software-based design on one chip is that some are "hard" cores, designed to run on a particular fab line, vs. "soft" cores, where process-dependent factors have to be added to the design. In order to meet this challenge, foundries are now developing large libraries of intellectual property (IP) that can be combined to form many SOC designs specifically geared to their processes. These cores can be shaped into a full chip design more quickly, and verification is easier because of the software uniformity. Patching together soft cores from different sources greatly complicates verification.
Rather than assembling a set of chips from a local distributor onto a board and then linking boards to make a system, more future designs will combine on three or four ICs many functions and the glue to make them work together. Foundry-type fabs will need flexibility to run these different chips at moderate or even small volumes, with frequent set-up changes.
The result will be a very different industry, with new business models and a whole new set of challenges and opportunities, resulting in some big winners, and some big losers. It will take time to evolve, but it is coming. Get ready for it!
--Bob Haavind, Editor in Chief